THE ANCIENT ROMAN CHURCH IN ENGLAND. [To THE EDITOR Or
TER " splacr.roz.-] Sra,—May I make a brief comment upon what I cannot but call an astounding assertion of a correspondent, "A. W. D.," in last week's Spectator ? I should be disingenuous were I to pretend I had never heard such an assertion before ; but a paradox does not cease to be such by being simply asserted, and is it not, then, very unwise to make Anglican defence depend in any degree on such statements as that " there never was a Roman Catholic Church in England " ? Can " A. W. D." have ever heard of the long list of Cardinals of the Roman Church who were Archbishops and Bishops of England ; of the foundation of Westminster Abbey as the result of a vow to the Pope ; of "the Pope's subdeacon and familiar" who signed Magna Carta; of the conflicts between Primates Anselm and it Becket on behalf of the Pope ; of the Feast of Corpus Christi; of the English Pope ; of the Monastic Orders; of the ancient Bishops' oaths of fealty to Rome; of the history of, e.g., the Lichfield See ; of the Papal dues ; of the letter of the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the Bishops to Pope John XXII., in which they speak of their jurisdiction as derived from him " as rivers from their source " ? Surely I may say that the ancient Catholic and Roman Church of this land is witnessed to, not merely by Allies, Duchesne, Fronde, Gairdner, Gasquet, Green, Lingard, Macaulay, Maitland, but by St. Thomas it Becket, St. Anselm, Archbishop Arundel, by the history, doctrine, devotions, Latin liturgy, feasts, and fasts of the ancient Church ; and as a visible modern token, by the very representations of the pallium which we can see on the arms of York and Canterbury to-day, and which have no meaning now, but meant of old that those Sees derived their jurisdiction from the Holy See. The argument from the phrase Bcdesia Anglicana is unworthy of " A. W. D." Was the old Church the German or Swedish Church ? Pope Leo XIII. called the Spanish Bishops " the Spanish Church," and also used the very phrase Bcdtsia Anglicana in his decree for the beatification of the English martyrs who suffered under Elizabeth. Surely we ought not to fight_ againstplain history.—I am, Sir, &c., J. W. POYNTER..
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